Church size: It's all in the numbers

Actual attendance is often much different than membership.

The Revs. Deloris Demps and Mac Brunson see a gap every Sunday between their membership figures and how many are seated in the pews.

At Demps' Mount Moriah United Methodist Church, average attendance is about 35, she said. Her 125-seat sanctuary could easily accommodate the 59 members on the roll.

Not so for Brunson, pastor of the 28,000-member First Baptist Church in downtown Jacksonville. The congregation - the Southern Baptist Convention's third-largest - can seat about 10,000 in its main sanctuary, and a few thousand more in other spaces.

But not the 28,000 on its rolls.

"If all our folks showed up on any given Sunday, we just couldn't handle 'em," Brunson said.

The fact that a membership-attendance gap exists in most congregations is nothing new. But it became a hot topic at the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting, held this month in Indianapolis.

There, delegates - called messengers in the Baptist tradition - approved a resolution urging congregations to count as members only those who are living active, committed Christian lives. The resolution noted that while the convention reports its total membership as 16.2 million, only 6.1 million "attend a primary worship service of their church in a typical week."

The resolution - which is non-binding because Baptist congregations are autonomous - also calls for churches to repent for failing to encourage active participation by "wayward church members" and urges them to actively reach out to inactive believers.

However, some experts inside and outside the denomination, even in agreeing with the spirit of the resolution, said its numbers are taken out of context and that there are multiple ways of measuring active participation.

The number on the rolls usually exceeds the number who attend services regularly, said Steve Marino of the Association of Religion Data Archives, which monitors religious trends and statistics.

It's also the case that congregations and denominations tend to report the higher number, Marino said.

"Groups want to appear as influential and as popular as they can," Marino said.

The Southern Baptist Convention's status as the nation's largest Protestant denomination is vital to its clout as a player in social and moral issues, said the Rev. Darrell Orman, pastor of First Baptist Church in Stuart and chairman of the denomination's resolutions committee.

But Orman said the denomination is not grossly over-reporting its true membership, as some resolution supporters suggested.

The 6.1 million attendance number referenced in the measure was derived from a snapshot count of one Sunday morning worship in the fall of 2007, said Roger Oldham, a spokesman at the denomination's headquarters in Nashville. It did not include people who attended evening services that day.

Orman also said the number also does not include snowbirds, shut-ins and people in nursing homes who are proud church members but cannot attend services regularly - or at all.

Brunson said it also does not include people who consider themselves faithful members by watching or listening to First Baptist Jacksonville's podcasts, Webcasts and Sunday morning broadcasts.

"You have some folks who don't come and are on the rolls, but would be offended if you took them off," Brunson said.

During debates over the resolution, its supporters said churches must be more vigilant in ensuring that only baptized, dedicated followers of Christ be counted as members, according to a June 11 Baptist Press story. Failure to do so suggests congregations aren't doing enough to foster authentic, enduring discipleship.

Orman and Brunson agreed but said many congregations already do that.

Brunson said First Baptist's reported 28,000 membership would "see a reduction" - though he wouldn't guess how much - if the rolls were aggressively scoured for people who have moved away or fallen from the faith.

That's what he did that when he arrived at First Baptist in Dallas in 1999, taking that church from a reported 20,000 members to about 12,000.

He hasn't done that since arriving in Jacksonville in 2006 because the congregation does a superb job of keeping up with members, Brunson said.

Its attendance runs 7,000 to 8,000 Sunday mornings, 3,000 to 4,000 on Sunday nights and up to 3,500 on Wednesday nights, Brunson said.

While such numbers are way out of her range, Demps lauded the Baptists for approving a resolution calling for stricter membership reporting.

"If you're not reporting all your numbers, you don't have accountability," she said.